What happened to Sen. Tom Cotton at the New York Times and Twitter signals serious danger for conservative and other dissenting views in the United States. And it is just one example among many.
The Left’s control of almost all the major outlets for opinion in this country — major newspapers and magazines, television, Hollywood, social media, and university faculties, among others — is a familiar phenomenon. But in the past, popular support for the constitutional guarantee of free expression under the First Amendment (even among liberals) was always a protection for the dissemination of conservative and other alternative ideas.
Now, however, a new group of progressives is moving into positions of power in all these news and cultural outlets, and they do not appear to acknowledge the rights of conservatives (or even liberals) to hold and express views that dissent from the progressive catechism. Instead, they are turning the media and other cultural institutions they control away from approval of free expression and focusing them in an unprecedented and dangerous new direction.
This authoritarian impulse, which can only be described as totalitarian, is a threat to the comity and freedom of expression that have always characterized this country.
The events at the New York Times are emblematic of these developments. Cotton’s opinion piece, coming in the wake of protests about the heinous police killing of a black man, George Floyd, took notice of the arson and looting that accompanied the legitimate expressions of anger and frustration. In view of that criminality, he endorsed sending in troops to restore order and protect persons and property.
An internal New York Times newsroom revolt forced the piece’s withdrawal, and the editor of the opinion page was forced to resign. This coup was not the only example of resistance to contrary opinion. A top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer was also forced to resign after a headline “Buildings Matter, Too” appeared in the paper, and an employee of Twitter threatened Cotton with the loss of his Twitter rights if he would not take down similar views he had expressed on that social media outlet.
An investigation by Project Veritas showed similar activity by employees at Facebook, even though Mark Zuckerberg had told Congress that discrimination of this kind was against his company’s policy. Most recently, under boycott pressure, Zuckerberg has buckled, suggesting that Facebook can “make progress on public health and racial justice” while “maintaining our democratic traditions.” We know where this is going.
This follows years in which all three major networks and two of three cable networks became outlets almost solely for leftist opinions, speeches by conservatives at colleges and universities were canceled because of angry student and faculty protests, companies were threatened with boycotts if they did not support leftist initiatives or their owners or officials contributed to conservative causes, media outlets (including the publicly supported National Public Radio) would not report on dissenting views or contrary science on the seriousness of climate change, universities would not grant tenure to conservative scholars, late-night comedians were all of one leftist voice, and the 1619 Project at the New York Times (a left-wing attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the founding of the U.S. itself) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
The latest is a report that Tucker Carlson’s Fox News television show is losing advertisers despite the fact that it has 4.5 million viewers — the largest audience across all of television. It’s likely that these advertisers have been threatened with boycotts for supporting Carlson’s divergent political views.
You can read for yourself how totalitarians of the Left think of divergent opinions. After the New York Times apologized for publishing Cotton’s opinion, it held a discussion among its staff on the subject. Many media reports quoted New York Times staff as fearing for their lives, as though this was just a Snowflake Putsch.
But it was much more, and in tune, regrettably, with the progressive views. According to a report by Kathleen Kingsbury, the editorial page editor, these comments reflected “what we stand for.” For example, Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times Magazine (and the author of the 1619 Project), said: “We as a news organization must air the opinion of someone like Senator Tom Cotton, but in a news article where we can check the facts and push back.” Kara Swisher, of the New York Times staff, “urged news organizations and social media companies to more deeply consider who gets to use their platforms to voice ideas.” Roxane Gay “called out what she saw as real errors of judgment that led to the Cotton Op-Ed being published.”
These are the people who will lead media organizations in the future. Their attitude, which the Wall Street Journal correctly calls “Jacobin,” has no precedent in this country since the Alien and Sedition Acts were repealed. The fact that it is mostly a product of the ignorant young should not provide comfort; unless moderation and a spirit of lenity intervenes, these incipient totalitarians will be the media’s masters in the years to come.
Peter J. Wallison is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is Judicial Fortitude: The Last Chance to Rein in the Administrative State. (Encounter, 2018).
